WHERE IS THE THRONE OF SATAN?

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” ~Ephesians 6:12

Christians understand God’s omnipresence. The word means that God knows exhaustively, and upholds and touches continually, every single item in the universe He has made, from the tiniest genes and electrons to the most massive stars in the expanding universe to the most complex mind-body interactions in the psyche of over 6 billion people. God is here, there, and everywhere, and His mind and Hand are on everything. We are never out of His sight (Psalm 139), and we cannot get away from Him (John 1). Wherever we are, He is there too. This is not simply a matter of transcending spatial confines. Strictly speaking, God has no spatial location at all, for space belongs to the created order and exists in Him rather than He in it. Such is the omnipresence of God. Scientists talk about simple one celled animals but a single human cell is anything but simple. It you typed the information found in a single human cell on standard typing paper, it would take a stack of paper higher than the Washington Monument and would require more than a hundred years just to read. You might also be astonished to know that the information is digital and that the digital age did not start during modern times, it has always existed.

As I write about the Throne of Satan, you should understand that Satan is the god of this world but he is not omnipresent. Satan was created by God but he cannot be in two places at the same time. Satan is aided by his demons though God restrains them to limit what they can do, but their hostility toward God and the godly has no limits. Wrecking God’s work, thwarting His grace, and bringing us to spiritual ruin is their common goal.

So where exactly was the throne of Satan? Read for yourself beginning in Revelation 2:12, “And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this: 13 I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. 14 But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality.…”

The people of Pergamum worshipped a myriad of Greek and Roman gods, but when Christianity arrived with the belief in just one god, the city’s pagan priests went on the attack and their most famous victim was a man named Antipas.

In the book of Revelation, Jesus called Antipas “my faithful martyr.” He was the bishop of Pergamum, ordained by the Apostle John. When Jesus looked down from the Cross and put His mother Mary in John’s care, John and Mary fled to Ephesus. I stood in the very location to the south of Ephesus where Mary’s tiny house was believed to have stood 2,000 years ago overlooking the Greek Islands in the Aegean Sea not far from the Isle of Patmos.

The pagan priests went to the Roman governor and complained that the prayers of Antipas were driving their spirits out of the city and hindering the worship of their gods. As punishment, the governor ordered Antipas to offer a sacrifice of wine and incense to a statue of the Roman emperor and declare that the emperor was “lord and god.”

Antipas refused and was sentenced to death on the Altar of Zeus otherwise known as the Throne of Satan. Most of that altar still survives today, and surrounding it are some of the world’s most famous marble friezes. They depict the Gigantomachy, or the battle between the Greek gods and the giants. At the top of the altar was a hollow bronze bull, designed for human sacrifice. Antipas was placed inside the bull and they tied him in such a way that his head would go into the head of the bull. Then they would light a huge fire under the bull, and as the fire heated the bronze, the person inside of the bull would slowly begin to roast to death. As the victim would begin to moan and to cry out in pain, his cries would echo through the pipes in the head of the bull so it seemed to make the bull come alive.

Even in the midst of the flames, the elderly bishop Antipas died praying for his church. The year was AD 92. I believe on the day Antipas died, Satan was present savoring the event. Satan’s time of reckoning is yet to come.

A few years later, the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation, mentioning the death of Antipas in Pergamum. Today, all that’s left there is the foundation; the Altar of Zeus is more than a thousand miles away.

The Pergamum Altar of Zeus or Satan is a monumental construction built during the reign of Greek King Eumenes II on one of the terraces of the acropolis of the ancient Greek city of Pergamum in Asia Minor.

The structure is 117 feet wide and 110 feet deep; the front stairway alone is 65 feet wide. The structure lay in ruins until 1878 when the German engineer Carl Humann began official excavations on the acropolis of Pergamum, an effort that lasted until 1886. The excavation was undertaken in order to rescue the altar friezes and expose the foundation of the edifice. Later, other ancient structures on the acropolis were brought to light. Upon negotiating with the Turkish government, a participant in the excavation, it was agreed that all frieze fragments found at the time would become the property of the Berlin museums. If you have read my previous writings you know that the Library of Pergamum rivaled the Library of Alexander to the degree that the Pharaoh demanded that papyrus paper could no longer be sent to Pergamum. As a result, Pergamum invented Pergamum Paper later known as Parchment.

The Altar of Zeus alternately known as the Pergamum Altar built between 197 and 156 B.C. formerly in Pergamum, Asia Minor, (today Bergama, Turkey) is now housed in Berlin’s Pergamum Museum. The Museum will be closed to all visitors for five years for the purpose of restoration work on the museum building that houses it. The authority that runs Berlin’s public museums said the central hall that contains the altar will likely not reopen until 2019.

After the relics of Satan’s throne were moved from Pergamum to Germany, Satan’s throne was re-erected twice in Berlin, in 1901 and 1930 respectively; each re-erection was followed by a world war – WWI & WWII. Does this also explain why both world wars exploded from Germany?

As a Presidential candidate, Barack Obama made his initial acceptance speech in 2008 for the DNC presidential nomination, from a nearly perfect replica of the Pergamum Altar of Satan. When this was pointed out many leftist bloggers and news outlets went crazy.

Hitler’s architect Albert Speer used the Pergamum Altar as the model for the Zeppelintribune Field used by Hitler to make his most grand speeches to the Nazis.

The Pergamum Museum was severely damaged during the air attack on Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Many of the display objects were stored in safe places, and some of the large pieces were walled in for protection. In 1945, the Red Army collected all of the loose museum items, either as war booty or, ostensibly, to rescue them from looting and fires then raging in Berlin. Not until 1958 were most of the objects returned to East Germany. Significant parts of the collection remain in Russia. Some are currently stored in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

Three years after parts of the Pergamum Alter were returned to Berlin, the Berlin Wall was built dividing the city for 28 years. During the 13 years or so the Alter was in Russia, the Cold War began. Is there any doubt that Satan is at work dividing countries?

Just four years after 300 boxcar loads of relics from Pergamum were returned to Germany from Russia, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962. What was not revealed until recently is that the United States agreed to dismantle our missiles in Turkey that were aimed at Russia. Those missiles were in the Pergamum region not far from Pergamum and they were called PGM-19 Jupiter ballistic missiles. The agreement was that the U.S. would dismantle the missiles but it would be done in secret. The Roman god Jupiter is the same as the Greek god Zeus.

Using the altar as his model, Speer created a colossal grandstand at the rally grounds in Nuremberg. It became known as the Zeppelintribüne. After the war, only a small part of it was left standing.

If you look at the kinds of ceremonies that were on display at Zeppelin field with the reconstructed temple there patterned on the Pergamum Altar, you’ll see photographs of Hitler, descending down the steps, like a tribune of the people from old Roman times.

In the middle of the grandstand, where the bronze bull altar of Zeus stood in ancient Pergamum, Albert Speer built Hitler’s podium. Hitler wanted to create what he called a “mass experience,” and Speer came up with the perfect idea.

Most of the Nuremberg rallies were held at night, so Speer surrounded the grandstand with 150 searchlights. The columns of light extended for miles in the sky, creating the mystical effect Hitler wanted:

This effect was known as the “Cathedral of Light,” and it became a hallmark of Hitler’s events. It was even used in the closing ceremonies of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Inside the rally grounds, thousands of Nazi Party members marched in torchlight parades.

From his podium, Hitler mesmerized the crowds with rhetoric, “Not every one of you sees me and i do not see every one of you. But I feel you… and you feel me!”

Then under the Cathedral of Light, thousands of Germans swore what they called a “holy oath.”

“Blazing flames hold us together into eternity…

No one shall take this faith from those who are dedicated to Germany.”

From 1933 to 1938, hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg every September for the Reichstparteitag, or Nazi Party Congress. But it was the 1934 rally that captured the attention of the world, thanks to what may be the greatest propaganda film of all time. It was also in Nuremberg that Hitler used the phrase “Final Solution” for the first time in public. “Bitter complaints have come in from countless places citing the provocative behavior of Jews. This law is an attempt to find a legislative solution. If this attempt fails, it will be necessary to transfer [the Jewish problem] … to the National Socialist party for a final solution.”

The Nuremberg Laws stripped the Jews of their rights as citizens.

They couldn’t teach in public universities, they couldn’t practice medicine in public hospitals, they couldn’t fly the national flag, but they could fly the Jewish flag. Then that was coupled with the Reich citizenship law, which said that Jewish people in Germany were subjects of the Reich, but not citizens.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” is now known as the Holocaust, a word that comes from a Greek word meaning “a wholly burnt animal sacrifice.” Does that remind you of the faithful martyr Antipas?

You can’t say that Satan’s Throne is not in the center of global affairs.

On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan in a speech in front of the Berlin Wall said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” During November 1989 the wall came down. Both Reagan and Gorbachev were Time Magazine men of the year.

Current Time Magazine Person of the year is German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was called Chancellor of the Free World.